


Home is Just Beyond My Reach

by Adlez27



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 02:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20827961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adlez27/pseuds/Adlez27
Summary: "Eiji Okumura" wasn't always his name. He always grew up thinking something was off, and he always wanted to run away from the life he had.





	Home is Just Beyond My Reach

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry.
> 
> The ideas for this fanfic started from anger and retaliation. I was sent a post listing a number of trans Eiji headcanons, and none of them seemed reasonable to me. "These are too silly and fluffy," I thought. It was as if all of the canon personalities and canon settings were thrown away, and replaced with generic happy ideals about transition. "That isn't what dysphoria feels like at all," I thought. 
> 
> The more I thought about the idea of Eiji being trans, the more I could see myself in him. He felt sad, and lonely, and trapped while living in Asia. So did I. He stayed in America, even just for a short time, and found wordless acceptance from his peers. So did I. His passport is cursed with a just barely outdated photo- so is mine! As a trans man with those experiences, I felt like I was in the position to be telling Eiji's story the way I saw it. But at the same time, I'm telling my own story.
> 
> I'm sorry about how gloomy and painful it turned out to be.

I can't tell exactly when I started feeling this way about myself. It was simply the way I always was. As a kid, I didn't act feminine the way I was "supposed to," but at that point, nobody really batted an eye at little girls who liked running and playing outdoors. My favorite days in elementary school were sports days, days that I continued by later joining my middle school's track and field team.

"Yuina, come here and help me with the laundry," my mom called into the house.  
So I came downstairs to help her.  
"These look a bit too small," she commented, holding up one of the sports bras I bought recently.  
"I need it for track and field," I explained.  
"You didn't like the ones I bought for you?"  
"It didn't fit right."  
"Your chest is growing, so you shouldn't be wearing something so tight," my mom said, scolding me.  
"I'll only wear it during practice," I proposed, though in reality these were the only ones I would wear from then on.  
I didn't want to admit that my chest was getting bigger. It didn't… look right. It was getting harder to recognize myself in the mirror.

One of my upperclassmen in the track and field team had suddenly cut her hair short. I admired how fresh and airy it looked. Even with a ponytail, my own head felt hot, sweat trapped within tangles. Despite how short the other girl's hair was, it still framed her face in a cute way. Surely, if I were to do the same, my mom couldn't protest.

"YUINA!" my mother shrieked when I came home after the haircut. "It's like you've gone bald!" she yelled, holding my head with her hands on both sides.  
The stylist had cut it a lot shorter than expected, but I didn't think it was so bad. I thought it had a rather cool look, but even then it could still grow back.  
"How could you do such a thing? Did someone break your heart?" my mom continued drilling. Though it was a little too early in my life to be experiencing heartbreak.  
"It's easier to take care of," I said. "My head feels too sweaty with long hair."  
"With that sports obsession of yours, someone is going to look at you and mistake you for a boy," my mom warned.  
It didn't really sound all that bad. Ignoring the fact that I was part of the girls' team, I could easily blend in with other boys my age.

As I went on to high school, more and more of the girls around me were enraptured by gossip, fashion, and romance. They pushed their uniforms to the limits, trying to flaunt their bodies as best they could to onlooking boys. I shared with them some interest in male classmates, but never found enough motivation to present myself the same way they did. And despite that, I found my eyes lingering on the girls for longer than I really ought to be. A complex feeling welled up within me- how could I be jealous of their looks if I didn't want to look the same? And as much as I admired guys, why did it kind of… hurt? As their voices fell in pitch, mine stayed the same. That's how girls' voices work, after all. And yet, I felt like I was stuck. Being left behind.

I hoped that I could escape these thoughts during practice and training, when skirts were exchanged for shorts and we pushed ourselves to our limits. But even more so with athletes you could see the underlying form of the human body. I looked at my well developed muscles with pride, a part of me that could spring me to new heights. And at the same time, I looked at my chest with disdain. At one point, I did try to wear a larger size, using a different brand of sports bra that promised support even through intense activity. But the sensation of the weight as it shifted around, even slightly, was enough to somehow ruin my focus and my mood. I went back to the one I preferred, strapping my chest completely flat.

I wasn't being childish, I thought, to be keeping this sort of appearance. There were certainly people out there who liked flat chests, and they weren't just a bunch of lolicons. Short hair was another one of the things I could control. My height was something I couldn't. It wasn't my fault that people saw me as so young, but I preferred being mistaken for a middle school boy, if I was allowed to have preferences.

My mother had different ideas about my maturity. "You really need to start thinking about your future, Yuina," she insisted. "You're 17. Without your father around, who's going to support our family?"  
It sounded encouraging enough, but I knew well enough what she actually meant. The law permitted women as young as 16 to get married with parental consent, and my mother wouldn't hesitate to give hers. She had been hounding me about my relationships and whether I knew boys from wealthy families. She had been giving me "advice" in the form of how to act as a housewife, bothering me far more often than my sister. Still, I pretended not to know this when I answered.  
"I'm going to apply for athletic scholarships," I said. "If I do well in my team, I could go to university for free."  
"I'm not so sure you'll get anywhere with that," she insisted. "You have better plans, don't you? Listen to your mother."

I decided to prove myself by putting 110% into my pole vaulting. My grades were starting to suffer, but as long as they made the minimum for athletic scholarships, they didn't really matter. I didn't expect that anyone would find it inspiring, much less a complete stranger who just happened to see me on TV.

And yet, somehow, Ibe's camera lens was able to stare right into my soul. It wasn't just the scholarship that motivated me to pour my heart into sport. It was the sensations of freedom and self control, detaching from the world while perceiving motion so intimately, changing what I had the power to change but being pulled back to earth in the end, serious business and serious fun. All of those moments were captured on film. You could forget everything else in the universe that only I could create. Caught up in my graceful flight, you could forget that you were looking at a woman. If I had to be memorialized, this was how I would have wanted to be seen.

My mom, once again, had different ideas about what Ibe's appearance meant. She had just about given up on teaching me how to become a wife, and apparently given up on being a proper wife herself. I didn't mind being left alone for once, but seeing my mother dolled up sent me flying into an unseen rage. Every ounce of bile I threw at her came from multiple angles: from abandoning my father, from taking advantage of a stranger, and some part of it from all of the bottled up hatred I had toward "womanly arts". I imagined myself trying to seduce Ibe, and it nearly made me sick. Was that what my mother wanted?

The spotlight that Ibe put on me had apparently won the attention of some scholarship committee. It was the deciding factor that led them to choose me over yet another baseball player. I entered college expecting it to be much like my high school days, primarily training mixed in with occasional cramming, with the addition of living away from home in the student athletes' dorm. The domestic skills that my mother tried to drill into me had their use after all.

The difference came in socialization. Once the day ended, I wasn't dragging his feet back home as always. Teammates and dormmates would invite me out to all sorts of new adult things in our vibrant college town. The first time I joined a group date, I carefully avoided the alcohol that the upperclassmen were drinking, and ended the night by myself. It took me a while to realize that I was probably only invited along to make the other girls look more beautiful in comparison. Or maybe it was to make the guys look more mature and handsome. The second time I joined one, I didn't realize it was a group date until people started pairing off. It was with a different crowd entirely, consisting entirely of women. Some of the women there were also short-haired athletes, with a rather more distinguished face than my cute expression. Seeing them was the first time I recalled ever feeling purely jealous, with no other emotions mixed in.

A girl who was still unpaired sidled up to me, and leaned her head on my shoulder. "Hey, you're Yuina, right?" she asked.  
"Uh, yeah," I mumbled. I felt awkward, in a sort of fluttery, shy way, but also feeling as if I had somehow lied. Her hair still smelled faintly of shampoo.  
"You're really cute for a butch," she said, now looking me directly in the eyes. Her hand brushed down my arm, fingertips reaching under the edge of my T-shirt. "Wow, you've got some strong muscles here. What team are you from?"  
"Track- track and field," I answered. "I'm a freshman, so this is my first year in the college team, but I was on my school team in middle school and high school."  
She sensed my shyness more readily now, delayed by the chuhai she drank earlier. She took a small step back and resolved to just holding my hand. "Ohh, this must be the first time you've been with so many other lesbians at once. Don't be shy, we don't really bite… hard," she said, laughing at her own joke.  
I tried to avoid eye contact, but made the mistake of looking at her chest, which seemed to almost spill out from her shirt. Instead, I focused on the hand that was holding mine. The nails were very short, but trimmed neatly, with a simple nail polish.  
I said, "I don't think I'm actually a lesbian, though." It was the truth. During high school, I did consider that possibility, but I couldn't ignore my attraction to men as well. I wasn't sure what I preferred, and I didn't feel ready to find out now. Either way, I felt out of place in a crowd of women.  
"That's too bad," she said, taking another small step away and letting go of my hand. "Though I have to wonder how you got invited. Get home safely, okay?"  
I went home alone again, wondering what kind of relationship I would have wanted to have.

My college life continued uneventfully until that fateful day. The coach had insisted on practice even though the grounds were still far too wet. I could already sense that my landing would be fucked up before I hit the ground, and my fear was confirmed when an excruciating pain shot through my ankle. My teammates immediately rushed in to help me with first aid, but as the hours passed, the pain didn't subside. I was brought to the hospital, and my family was called. My mother arrived with loud feelings of concern, but I knew that under the mask there must have been anger. How dare I put another burden on the family by being the second to enter the hospital!

At first, I wanted nothing more than to heal quickly. Nothing could be said for sure about the condition of my ankle and whether I could return to the track and field team. With my cup of hope entirely full, I prayed for a simple recovery. But as time went on, it became more and more clear that some of the damage was irreparable. I could certainly try to return to the team, but not in the peak condition that put me on the team in the first place. And only after completing physical therapy. I knew that nobody was judging me, but the fact that I had to relearn how to walk when my only pride was running left me deeply embarrassed.

Returning to school meant returning to the athletes' dorm, and returning to the dorm meant facing my teammates. I had let them down. I replayed that moment over and over in my head. Even with the hazardous conditions, I thought of all the minute changes I could have made to change the outcome. If only I had changed my position at some exact instant, the impact wouldn't have been as bad. If only I was smart or capable enough to do such a thing. My athleticism was the only thing I could lean on, and if it wasn't perfect anymore, it was completely lost. I couldn't face any of the other students at my college, the ones who studied hard and took exams and paid their tuition. Their money was subsidizing a loser like me who only got in because I knew how to jump.

I tried not to stay in the hospital for too long, and ended up lingering at home instead. My cup of hope was already entirely empty. Days were spent idle, consumed by thoughts of my own uselessness. Now that my younger sister was reaching the critical age, my mother had shifted focus and started grooming her for an early marriage instead. I was at least thankful for that. I was thankful that I didn't have to face the world as a woman, but I still felt somewhat guilty for failing my mother in the only way I had left. I managed to still do a few minor errands like buying groceries, but it drained me incredibly to be out even just once a day. I couldn't bear to be seen by anyone anymore, and as soon as I gave up on these small tasks, I would be nothing more than a living corpse.

The doorbell rang. With my sister away at school, and my mother busy, I answered.  
"Hello, I'm from NHK, and-"  
I closed the door.

The second time the doorbell rang, I didn't answer it. I took up the entire length of the couch, staring at a single page of English-language children's novel without really reading it. I wasn't about to subject myself to a pissed-off NHK fee collector. My mother, who didn't know what was lying beyond the door, answered it instead.  
"Hello, is Yuina home?" a different man's voice asked.  
"Oh, Mr. Ibe! Are you taking more photographs?" my mom replied, confirming the identity of the visitor.  
"No, just visiting. I tried going to the college, but her teammates said she got injured. Just wanted to say hello and see how she's been doing these days," Ibe explained.  
"Yuina's in the living room," my mom said.

I heard the door close as Ibe stepped inside. I kept my nose stuck inside the book. If I appeared busy or uninterested, perhaps the visitor would leave. I didn't understand why Ibe would want to see me specifically. If he really did visit the college, there were plenty of other athletes to take photos of. Fully functioning human beings, and not dead weight like me. Any photo of me in my current state would unlock the emptiness I became.

"Hey there, Okumura. How's your foot?" Ibe asked, approaching the couch. I lowered the book and pulled my feet in so that Ibe could sit down. My mother retreated to the kitchen to fetch some tea.  
"My ankle is fine," I answered, in a tone of voice that accidentally came out more dull and annoyed than intended.  
"Sorry, your ankle. Glad to hear that though," Ibe said, looking at my ankles. He couldn't tell which one had been injured. "When are you planning to head back to your team? After you finish physical therapy, right?"  
"I already finished it a long time ago. And I can't go back," I said, closing the book and tossing it on the table. My mother arrived with the tea at that moment, and straightened out the book with a disappointed sigh. She wanted to stay in the room for some light conversation, but I seemed to be in a bad mood. Once she left, I continued saying, "It's not the same as it used to be. I won't be able to do anything that I used to."  
"What about your classes?" Ibe asked.  
"I just don't get them. My teachers don't expect much because I'm an athletic scholar, but I've been gone for so long that I'll probably never catch up."  
"Well, the sooner you go back, the easier it'll be. I'm sure it's possible if you just gave it a try."  
I simply apologized.

Ibe leaned over to pick up his cup of tea and took a long sip. "Well, staying here for such a long time hasn't done you much good so far. Why don't you come with me to work sometimes?"  
"I'd rather not be around athletes," I said.  
"It's not just sports photography. I'm doing all kinds of reporting these days. I'd love for you to come see it."  
I thought over it for a while. "Why not."  
Ibe smiled. "Great, I'll tell your mother about it. If it's alright with her, I'll come here tomorrow morning. You can worry about your school situation some other time." He stood up and went looking for her.  
I sat up properly, picked up my book, and drank my tea while flipping to the next page.

Ibe started bringing me along to work more and more often. He was initially worried that his coworkers would recognize me as the athlete from his breakout photo gallery, but unless you looked at my face closely, you couldn't. I wore glasses to avoid the effort of putting on contacts. The hair that I usually kept in a short, clean haircut had been allowed to reach nearly shoulder length, growing tangled and greasy. Aside from office work, Ibe realized that I became quite helpful out on the field. He even decided to officially have me on as his intern. But despite all that he tried, Ibe couldn't shake the feeling that there was still no light in my eyes.

"Have you been getting enough sleep?" Ibe asked.  
"Yeah," I said in monotone, carefully putting a lens back into its bag.  
"Eating properly?" Ibe knew I had a proper lunch on work days, but not about my other habits.  
"Yeah," I said again.  
"Exercising?"  
"Still following the PT's routine," I said. Ibe wasn't sure whether I was tired or annoyed.  
"Are you enjoying this? The photography work."  
I didn't answer immediately. After some silence, I admitted, "I don't know."  
"You don't have to do this if you don't want to," Ibe said.  
I made another affirmative noise. "You don't really need me to be here."  
"No no no, you're very helpful. I mean, I have done this alone before, but you make it a lot easier," Ibe reassured.  
"So, it wouldn't matter that much if I were gone." I zipped up the case, and instead of carrying it myself, I handed it to Ibe.

That's when it clicked.  
"It absolutely would matter if you were gone, Okumura. Look, you've done a great job of taking care of your physical health, but you still need to take care of your mental health too. That's just as important," Ibe explained.  
"But I'm not crazy or anything. I'm just a normal person," I said. I stared Ibe directly in the eyes. "What kind of person do you think I am?"  
Despite the bravery that I was putting on, my heart was pounding so fast that I felt it jumping up into my throat. Ibe realized the truth about me, the disgusting fucking truth. I always did have an incurable insanity inside of me, a sick delusion about somehow, SOMEHOW being a man. Most of the time I could push the feeling underwater. I could forget how much I wanted to tear apart my own skin. I could forget about the insatiable yearning for the impossible. But something must have slipped through for Ibe to notice this- of course, I had been living his life with this "secret" all too blatantly on display for years. It was only a matter of time until someone realized how fucked up I am.

"It seems to me like you could be depressed, and I don't want you to end up hurting yourself," Ibe said, gently putting his arms around me.  
That thought didn't even occur to me. These were the facts: I threw away his academic life in pursuit of athletics. I threw away my social life and responsibilities as a woman by defying my mother. I lost everything he had in athletics by making that one damn mistake. It was perfectly logical for me to be unsatisfied with myself, and perfectly logical to be at a loss for what to do next. Ibe only gave me a chance because I was so pitiful, but "pity" was just another word for "disappointment".  
"You're more than a washed up student athlete, or a photography assistant. You matter to me as a person, and I want to make sure that you're living happily. So even if you aren't depressed, could we at least find out for sure?" he proposed.

The next time we went on a field trip, we ended up at a mental health center. I wanted to believe that I didn't belong here, but if there was anyone who could knock some sense into me and accept life as a woman, it was the people here. At least Ibe didn't know anything, andhe never would. All he would notice is me gradually taking better care of my appearance, dressing nicely and smiling. But for some reason, my mental image contained my sister rather than myself.

What happened instead was entirely the opposite of what I expected. Ibe's suspicions were confirmed, and apparently depression really was about feeling completely uninterested in life instead of crying dramatically every night. And when I finally managed to come forward with my especially delusional feelings…  
There was a precise name for it.  
Gender dysphoria.  
And the correct way to treat it, apparently, was to go full-force and live as the gender that I wanted to be. I couldn't really believe it at first, but entirely by luck, the psychologist he was talking to happened to be especially knowledgeable about the LGBT community. We finished talking for the time being. I wiped my tears, and when I rejoined Ibe in the reception area, I didn't say anything except that I wanted to come back.

Over the next visits, we determined that medical intervention wouldn't be necessary to handle my depression, but was a prudent course of action for my dysphoria. A diagnosis was formally described for both as letters, which I decided to let Ibe read.  
"I can handle the cost of having you see a therapist regularly, but not something as drastic as…" Ibe said. "I'm not saying they were wrong. I'm just saying that you'll have to ask your family to help you with that."  
"How am I going to tell them?" I asked.  
"The same way you told me. You can just let them read that letter," Ibe answered. He carefully put them both back inside of the folder and handed it back to me. "I didn't really see that coming, but in hindsight, it sort of makes sense. So, what should I call you?"  
"Huh?"  
"Your name, stuff like that. Okumura works, but at this point, it's starting to feel kind of impersonal."  
"I haven't even thought about my name yet. Okumura is fine," I answered.  
"I'll also be making sure that people in my office recognize you as male," Ibe added.  
"Do you really need to go that far? It'll be hard for them, especially when I clearly don't look like it," I said.  
"Unless you say 'absolutely not', I have to insist," Ibe said, tapping on the folder that I was holding. "If it could build up your self-confidence, I'm all for it."  
But when it came to confronting my family, I was on my own.

The first parent that I talked to was my father. He had actually supported me back when I decided to forge my own path and pursue the athletic scholarships. This was something similar, albeit a lot more drastic. If by chance my father completely disapproved, it wouldn't be difficult to cut off contact completely. There wasn't much I depended on my father for, now that he couldn't work anymore.  
"I consulted someone about my health recently," I said, having chosen these words ahead of time.  
"Is this about your ankle?" my dad asked.  
"No, uh," I mumbled, handing him the letter instead.  
"Sorry Yuina, I can't read this without my glasses," he complained. "Couldn't you just tell me what it's about?"  
"If I were to uh… change my name, change how I look, and live the rest of my life as a man, what would you think?" I asked sheepishly.  
"Did you commit a crime?" my dad said.  
"NO! Of course not, I never would! I'm not running away or anything," I insisted.  
My father started laughing. "I'm joking, I'm joking, you're a good kid. So, why do you ask?"  
"The truth is," I said, now looking away. "I've always felt more like a boy than a girl. So much that it would hurt. And if I want to live a happy life, I would have to do it as a man."  
My father took a deep breath. "With me here already, our family doesn't have a lot to spend."  
"I know."  
"But let's say a doctor told you that you have to do that."  
"A doctor did."  
"Oh, I see. Well, I was saying… that means you have to do it. That's my answer. But what will your mother think… have you told her yet?"  
"No, not yet."  
"As the new man of the house, you need to take responsibility for the whole family. If you can do that, she should be proud of you," my father said. "So do your best."  
I smiled and held his hand for a moment. "I will."

I finally worked up the courage to talk to my mom. I already knew from the start that she would be more critical- after all, a majority of the pressure I felt over the years came from her. I used the same opening line: "I consulted someone about my health recently."  
"That's good, even with Ibe dragging you out all the time you've had such low energy," she said, taking the folder from me and reading the first letter. "I hope we won't have to do much… counselling?"  
"I can pay for that using my internship," I explained, which was a roundabout way of saying that Ibe paid for it. "But the other one-"  
"Oh," my mother said softly, as she started to read the second. The expression on her face hardened. She closed the folder and said, "Medications and surgeries? If it was like your ankle injury, that's one thing, but this is a mental problem. You don't need this."  
"No, but, they said," I stuttered. "It would really help me if I could- it doesn't have to be all at once, but sooner is better, but it's…"  
"You should keep seeing a therapist, or better yet, get a different therapist," my mom demanded. "I knew something was wrong with you all along, but I just couldn't get through to you. They clearly understand the same thing, and if I'm going to believe what this letter says, it's worse than I thought."  
I bit hard on both of his lips, tears leaking out of my eyes.  
"Encouraging you to take drugs and get surgeries- haven't you even thought about the consequences? It's downright irresponsible! You can't do that, you won't be yourself anymore," my mom continued.  
But I will be! I screamed inside his head, though my voice wouldn't come out just yet.  
"Don't be a burden," she stated matter-of-factly.  
"It doesn't… matter!" I cried, furiously wiping my eyes on my wrists. "I don't care how much it costs, I have to- I can't be stuck like this… I have to move forward!"  
"If you want to be a man so badly, you got one thing right," my mother said. "You're just as selfish as your father."

I washed my face repeatedly, but no matter how many times I did, nothing in the mirror changed. I peeled off my clothes, which had by now become drenched in sweat, and stepped into the shower. The cold water hardly shocked me at all; it was the way I always showered. I cursed himself for trying to talk to my mother, I cursed myself for becoming emotional, I cursed myself for letting Ibe convince me to start visiting the mental health center in the first place. If I let himself stay shut up in this house, I could have rotten from the inside out and died an early death. That wasn't so bad. Instead, I had the wonderful fortune to learn that my thirst for the impossible was not only possible, but was supposed to be a solution instead of a problem. But that too was taken away- as if I ever deserved hope in the first place!

I didn't know who to believe. I wanted to believe that the psychologist was telling the truth, that it was okay for me to act and become backwards. I wanted some fragment of myself to believe in, that even if I gave up on facing society as I was originally supposed to be, I could still be alive. But what was one voice out of the billions of eyes and ears that saw and heard otherwise? Either the rest of the world is normal and I'm insane, or the rest of the world is insane and I alone am normal. I couldn't possibly bear the burden of fighting for I own delusion. If all I really wanted was to be self sufficient, a woman could do that too. It was easier to bow to that expectation.

"Boku wa otoko da," I said, my voice gently reverberating against the tiled walls. I am a man. As quiet as it was, the high pitch of it seemed to echo even more loudly inside my head. The words, no matter how badly I wanted to say them, didn't sound like they belonged to the voice I was hearing.  
I tried again in English. "I am a boy," I said. My voice dropped in pitch whenever I spoke this language. I always liked that.

I smothered shampoo over the surface of my hair and tried to massage it in. It had been too long since I did this. I pushed his fingers into my hair, yanking sharply downwards to rid it of tangles. I did this repeatedly, wincing through all the pain, and succeeded in pulling out several tufts of hair instead. The water began to pool around my feet as the drain clogged up. By the time my hair became tangle-free, my head was stinging all over. But it was alright, my hair was becoming one of the worst parts of me anyway. There was something incredibly soothing about the pain. I hurriedly soaped down the rest of my body, rinsed off, and stepped out of the shower. My wet feet slid across the floor almost exactly the same way they did on that fateful day. The difference was that this time, I clung onto the sink as I fell and pulled myself back upright. After drying off a bit, I wore the towel back to his room, got dressed, and fell straight asleep. I would've preferred not to wake up the next morning, so that I wouldn't have to deal with asking myself such difficult questions anymore.

Ibe had an interesting proposal for my mother. Since it was becoming so stressful to have me staying here all the time, he could take me out of her hands completely. He had a friend in New York, and wanted to travel there for a while to work on some projects. If I could come along, I could break out of the monotony and not have to worry so much about my life in Japan. But my mother was skeptical at first. Ibe did, after all, bring me to that quack health center that tried to insist on validating my delusions instead of getting rid of them. But Ibe promised to be in regular contact with her and keep her updated on my wellbeing. And though she tried not to feel this way, she started to think that it would be nice not having to see her most problematic child every day.

The trip was slated to be just a few weeks long. Despite that, my mother packed for me as if I was moving out of the house. At my insistence, we managed to cut it down to just one big nearly-overweight suitcase, and one bulging backpack. Still, Ibe did warn that the trip was subject to extend depending on the circumstances, so better safe than sorry.  
"Call me every week at the very least, but please try to call more often," my mom said as I stood in the entrance to the house.  
"I'll try," I said, slipping my shoes on. Ibe stood just outside the door.  
"If you don't, Ibe can call instead, but don't let that happen too much," she added. "I want to hear your voice, and I'm sure you'll miss the sound of your mom's voice too."  
Ibe carried my suitcase to the car he rented, then came back to the door.  
"And most importantly," my mother said, now that both of us were listening. "I don't want you doing ANY of that transsexual nonsense." She looked directly at Ibe. "Yuina better come back home in exactly the same state that she leaves. I'm letting her get fresh air under YOUR supervision, not run away and ruin her life however she wants. Be responsible, you two."  
I didn't know what I was expecting, or if I was hoping for anything, but it still hurt.

As they were on the plane, I took a closer look at his new passport. The second page bore the entire and only identity I would legally be known by in the United States. In English print, the five letters of my given name. A photo featuring long hair that framed my bored expression, despite deciding to finally cut my hair again just after the photo was taken. The letter "F" taunted me, as if it stood for "failure".  
Ibe noticed me and realized what was going on. "It doesn't have to define you," he said. "Did you ever think about what name you want to use?"

I faced Ibe and nodded. "Yeah. My name is Eiji."

**Author's Note:**

> One more chapter will be written about Eiji's time in America, spanning the entire length of Banana Fish. For the most part, all of the events are exactly the same as canon. The fic itself will just focus on any specific moments that change with Eiji being trans. Because of that, I can't guarantee it'll be just as long as this chapter, but I hope you'll be looking forward to it.


End file.
